Eva Murray moved to Matinicus Island in 1987 to teach in the one-room
school. Two years later she married the island electrician and stayed
to raise their family there. Over the years she has started a small bakery,
become an emergency medical technician, taken on a number of roles in
municipal government and volunteer organizations, started the
community's recycling program, and been a first responder to emergencies
both real and imagined. Since 2003 she's also been a regular columnist
for several mainland publications. Eva bakes bread in a wood stove,
spins wool, digs potatoes, collects useful herbs, cuts hay with a scythe
and swings a blacksmith's hammer. (Not surprisingly, she sometimes writes her articles with pencil and paper.)

On six remote, windblown Maine islands, the children are still educated in one-room schools. After two mainland one-room schools closed in 2009, these islands maintain the last taxpayer-funded public one-room elementary schools in the state. But despite very small student populations and sometimes shrinking communities, these remaining schools are not slated to close. Consolidation is impractical, a daily commute is usually impossible, island families are determined to keep their communities viable, and all agree that a school is a central part of a stable, year-round community.

You might think that these tiny schools are an anachronism, offering an old-fashioned approach to education. You'd be wrong. They are among the most technologically savvy schools in the state and offer a culturally rich educational experience. Author Eva Murray moved to Matinicus in 1987 to teach in the one-room school, married and raised a family on the island, and has served on the school board and volunteered in the school. She has traveled from island to island, collecting the stories that tell how these small communities promise their handful of children a modern education within the context of a specialized and sometimes extreme offshore lifestyle. The hows and whys will fascinate educators, and the details of island life will interest everyone.

"Safely Out to Sea" is Eva Murray's personal website. Murray
is a freelance writer who lives full time on Matinicus Island in Maine.
You may link from here to Eva Murray's writing in area publications such
as Maine Boats, Homes & Harbors; Working Waterfront; Down East
online and the (Rockland) Free Press. There are archived columns from
the op-ed pages of the Knox County Times, the Lewiston Sun Journal, and
other Maine newspapers. Read some of her essays and articles about
island life and about other things, view some images of Matinicus
Island, check out her book "Well Out to Sea," or send her a note.

Matinicus Island is located at the approach to Penobscot Bay in the
mid-coast region of Maine. A small rocky outpost roughly 23 miles from
Rockland, the nearest mainland city, without daily ferry service or any
guarantee of transportation to or from the island in bad weather, the
island community has a well-deserved reputation for isolation,
independence, and defiance. Our resident population averages below 100
people, and can be well below that in the deep winter. Even during the
summer "tourist season" Matinicus is the smallest of small towns. The
weather can be ferocious, and the sense of being truly cut off from the
rest of the world when sea conditions make boat travel unsafe
contributes to the islanders' sense of their own resilience and
strength.

Sometimes, the meteorologists on the evening news reassure the mainland
population that with a bad storm coming, they need not worry as "the
storm is headed safely out to sea." While that news is wonderful for
Portland and Bangor, the reality is often that the storm is then headed
straight toward us. We hear the expression "safely out to sea" on the
weather report as an indication that the mainlanders have forgotten that
people live out here on the islands, and that we are about to get
hammered by the wind...again.

There is another meaning, however. For centuries, and certainly over the
past couple of years, Matinicus Island has been called a place of
lawlessness, anarchy, and violence. In roughly 300 essays and articles
published over the past nine years, I have tried to make the point that
such a characterization does not accurately represent all of us, all of
the time. It is true--there are no police on the island, sometimes
people come here to avoid responsibility and they bring their troubles
and their misbehavior with them, there has been some rough stuff lately
and lobstermen do live largely by their own ethic"”but those of us who
call this place home feel safe in doing so. I can leave my door unlocked
at night and the key in my automobile. To those who believe Matinicus
to be a den of iniquity, I ask: can you do those things where you live?

"Want to run away from the 'real' world and live on an island off the
coast of Maine? Well, Eva Murray will show you that life on Matinicus is
very real, and she'll do this with insight, compassion, feistiness, and
just the right amount of humor. Reading this book is almost as much fun
as driving the ferry!"
-- Captain Abe Baggins, Maine State Ferry Service

"As a First Class ship pilot (any tonnage) for nearly thirty years, I
had a lot of contact with people on Matinicus Island, where we had a
pilot station. I have wished for some time that someone would write a
descriptive story about Matinicus and its people. Mission accomplished
with Eva Murray's book "Well Out to Sea."
-- Captain Gilbert Hall

What's it like to live on an island twenty-two miles out to sea? Where
there are only three dozen winter residents? Where the local economy is
lobstering? Period. Where your most reliable source of transportation
off the island may be a small Cessna and the airstrip is dirt (or snow
or mud)? Where, if the forecaster says the storm is "headed safely out
to sea," you know it's coming your way?

Eva Murray moved to Matinicus in 1987 to teach in its one-room school.
She married an island man and stayed to raise their family there. Over
the years she's written a number of lively columns and articles for
mainland publications. These are the stories of a unique community, of
an interdependence that is all too rare these days but necessary for
this island's survival. Murray writes with a keen eye and sharp wit,
sharing stories that are sometimes poignant, sometimes mind-boggling,
and often hilarious. She lives in a place where, "You love it,
absolutely love it here, 51 percent of the time. That is enough to make
you stay."¯

2,000-3000 years ago, Quaternary Period: oceans roughly at
present level. Peninsulas, bays, and islands of coastal Maine have their
present shape. Matinicus, Criehaven, Matinicus Rock, Wooden Ball, No
Man's Land, Two Bush, Seal, and Ten Pound Islands probably looked much
as they do now, only without the multicolored bits tangled up in the
bladderwrack.

2006: The Matinicus Congregational Church gets running water to the
kitchen after a century of doing without because the year before twelve
island women, of a respectable age, peeled down behind the rose bushes
for a worthy cause. The calendar sold out quickly, and only a few
helpful souls wrote to inform us that we were going to hell.